Director: David Ayer
Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Peña, David Harbour
Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone, David Ayer
116 mins. Rated R for strong violence, language throughout, and drug content.

Some men will literally kill dozens of criminals rather than go to therapy.

At first glance, you might see A Working Man and think, “didn’t that come out last year?” No, that was The Beekeeper, and yes, A Working Man could very easily have been a sequel. Featuring the same director and lead and a generic action setup, it wouldn’t have surprised me if this had been a surprise sequel with more HONEY and HIVE puns. Alas, A Working Man wants to have fun, but its premise is far too serious, so the goofiness is confusing rather than endearing, and it misses the so-bad-its-good mark that it’s seemingly attempting to reach.

Jason Statham (The Meg) stars as Levon Cade, a former black ops agent who opted for a simple life as a construction worker. His boss, Joe Garcia (Michael Peña, The Martian), is practically family, so when Joe’s daughter is kidnapped by human traffickers, Cade promises to find her and bring her home. Now, his particular set of skills will be put to the test, and his time to find her alive is running out.

A Working Man operates as a clone of Liam Neeson’s Taken or even Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: Last Blood (coincidentally, Stallone was a screenwriter on A Working Man) but expecting anything near the quality of those films would be futile. A Working Man has a serious conflict of tone, with subject material that almost requires a serious hand and a musical score that adds to that tone. However, the screenplay from Stallone and director David Ayer (Suicide Squad) has laughable dialogue and goofy characters making the strangest expression. There’s a scene where Statham dispatches a drug dealer while revealing that his fight isn’t with him, and the score even turns somber when the drug kingpin dies. I’m not sure why I’m supposed to feel bad that this drug dealer who tried to kill our hero multiple times should warrant my sadness, but that seems to be the goal.

Levon Cade is another rather predictable Jason Statham character, serving as a shell for the actor to just play the type he character he always does. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in a predictable story (and again, one that should be played seriously), the whole affair is wash/rinse/repeat. Cade is initially presented as a father who has lost custody of his daughter due to PTSD he’s received in the line of duty, and his mental health is dismissed as unimportant and then never mentioned again. The movie tries to tackle serious ideas with silly execution, like when Cade’s daughter says she’s mad at her mom for dying before stating that grandpa, who she lives with, took all of her pictures down. Again, this is never brought up again. Later, Cade is questioned by a human trafficker as to why he hates them so much, and I’ll share a bit of that conversation:

-Human Trafficker (HT): Why do you hunt us?
-Cade: Do you have a daughter?
-HT: No.
-Cade: Then you wouldn’t understand.

Is he making the argument that only people with families understand that human trafficking is a bad thing? I feel like the only people who think human trafficking is okay are actual human traffickers, and I’d argue most of them know it’s wrong and just don’t care.

Now, the movie has a few set pieces that work, particularly an awesome fight in the back of a van, and at times, it hearkens back to the classic Cannon Films of the 1980s, but it can’t seem to decide what it wants, resulting in a frustrating experience that just may be the funniest movie you see this year, for all the wrong reasons.

Your dad is going to love A Working Man, but I sure didn’t. I go into every movie hoping to like it, and this one started out a lot stronger than it ended, and its frustrating tonal confusion and predictable plotting lost me, but if your idea of a great movie features ridiculous plot armor for a lead character, lines of dialogue like “I am the big potato,” and angry maple syrup intimidation (it’s in there), then A Working Man might be right for you.

2/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, click here.